About the Project

Let’s Do The Time Walk Again! Exploring the East Kent Coast Through Digital Heritage is a National Lottery Heritage funded project. Canterbury Christ Church University has been awarded £67,397.00 by the National Lottery Heritage Fund to work with four coastal museums in East Kent to help preserve their archives, upskill volunteers in key digital practices and tell the story of these towns beyond their traditional seaside heritage. Through a series of training workshops volunteers will learn to record at-risk archives and develop their digital story-telling skills, creating web content that will explore different aspects of 19th and 20th century life in Broadstairs, Ramsgate, Deal and Sandwich.

About the National Lottery

The National Lottery Heritage Fund is the largest funder for the UK’s heritage. Using money raised by National Lottery players we support projects that connect people and communities to heritage. Our vision is for heritage to be valued, cared for and sustained for everyone, now and in the future. From historic buildings, our industrial legacy and the natural environment, to collections, traditions, stories and more. Heritage can be anything from the past that people value and want to pass on to future generations. We believe in the power of heritage to ignite the imagination, offer joy and inspiration, and to build pride in place and connection to the past.

Project Team

Carolyn Oulton

Carolyn Oulton is Professor of Victorian Literature and Director of the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers at Canterbury Christ Church University, where she also teaches on the Creative and Professional Writing BA. She is the Project Lead. Her research interests include seaside literary heritage and the culture of shared reading.

Michelle Crowther

Michelle Crowther is an Academic Librarian at Canterbury Christ Church University and co-lead on the project. When she’s not teaching students how to search 19th century periodicals, marking hyptertext up and down, or chasing Dickens around a virtual map, she is researching Kent history and Victorian manuscript culture.

Lesley Hardy

Lesley Hardy is the Impact Officer for the Project. She is the Director of Timelocked Heritage and also an Anglican Priest. Her work is based on the place of the past in our lives. She has many years of experience in the development and delivery of community based heritage projects.

Heather Murdoch

I’m Heather Murdoch, Project and Digital Officer for Let’s Do The Time Walk Again! and a recent graduate of CCCU, where I completed a BA in English Literature and an MA in Visual Communication. As a Kent-based creative, my journey has been defined by a deep passion for storytelling - whether through the written word, visual communication or digital media. Being part of the Time Walk project offers an exciting opportunity to bring these interests together in a meaningful way, supporting partner museums and empowering volunteers to share local heritage through accessible and engaging digital platforms.

Aayush Ale

Aayush Ale is a Computer Science undergraduate at Canterbury Christ Church University and a Digital Officer for the Project. He is a full-stack developer passionate about building practical, user-focused applications that solve real-world problems.

Darran Cowd

Darran has worked in museums and heritage for thirty years. A curator and archivist by training he has held variety of curatorial posts in local and national museums including the RAF Museum and National Coal Mining Museum. For the last ten years Darran has been based in Kent working on a number of National Lottery funded museum development projects including the Kent Mining Museum and Folkestone Museum. His passion is industrial heritage & archaeology and has been involved professionally and voluntarily in the conservation of scheduled industrial monuments, restoration to working order of a number of steam locomotives and the excavation & exploration of a Tudor Cornish tin mine.

Lisa Redding

Lisa has been a Trustee of Deal Museum since 2021 and Co-Chair since 2022 and has found it an excellent way to get to know the history of Deal since moving there in 2018. Now retired, she spent over 20 years in the Civil Service, working on European Structural Funds, managing grants programmes for the charitable sector and helping set up the London Funders membership body for major charity funders in London. She then moved into working with charities themselves including managing volunteers at a community centre in southeast London, working as a fundraising consultant and as the Chief Executive of London’s voluntary sector umbrella body. Bringing these experiences to the Museum has helped us achieve accreditation by the Arts Council, establish robust financial and administrative systems and develop a team of Trustees who are engaged and supportive.

Partnering Museums

The Clock House Museum Ramsgate

The Ramsgate Clock House Museum contains documents relating to the history of the harbour including the letter conveying King George IV’s “Gracious Pleasure that this port be called “The Royal Harbour of Ramsgate” and ‘Harbour Minutes Register’ 1909-1915 covering the early years of WW1.

Roman artefacts with contemporary graffiti, recovered from the Richborough fort, as well as WW1 graffiti and important documents to tell the harbour’s story, linking to Dunkirk small boats. The harbour, like the town, was subject to enemy attack and related problems and dangers associated with wartime activity. Image credit: Penny Mayes, The Clockhouse, Royal Harbour, Ramsgate.

Deal Museum

Deal Museum holds large collections of postcards, prints, photographs, records and newspapers that show the history of the town through the ages: naval town; smuggling town; base for the Royal Marines; mining town and seaside resort.

The thread running through it is the beach - for example the by-elections in 1880 saw the beach as a site of electioneering, corruption and rioting, with canvassers jockeying to influence residents with ‘a pint or a purse’, resulting in the effective disenfranchisement of the constituency.

The Dickens Museum, Broadstairs

Collections at the Dickens Museum, Broadstairs include Dickensiana and related items documenting the importance of Dickens’s legacy to the town. They include rare editions, 20th century Dickens Festival slides and programmes; photographs of author and festival organiser, Gladys Waterer.

Other unique items relating to Thanet include the rate book for Broadstairs and St Peter’s 1838-39 and rate book for St Peter’s 1843 including lodgings occupied by Marian Evans (George Eliot). Image Credit: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Guildhall Museum, Sandwich

Sandwich Guildhall Museum holds early 20th century postcards and cartes de visite. These collections show the vibrant life of the Cinque Port town, which has close links with neighbouring Deal, including correspondence addresses of early visitors to Sandwich that will stimulate research into visitor demographics from the start of the last century. This history has been eclipsed due to the greater accessibility of records relating to Thanet resorts.